ranking the memoirs

In a fit of post-birthday shopping I decided "to hell with only buying digital books or borrowing from the public libary" and that I would buy me some books.

I ended up with four memoirs:

• Educated by Tara Westover
• Diary of a bookseller by Shaun Blythell
• Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
• Girl with the lower back tattoo by Amy Schumer

The first three were all books on my mental must-read list after listening to the authors interviewed on Radio New Zealand; the last one I got because there was a buy-3-get-one-free deal at the bookshop.

I began with Diary. It's quite amusing in a Lake Wobegon sort of way and really reminds me of the Black Books tv show. So, not a waste of money but not un-put-down-able.

So I moved on to Educated. Which is a wonderful read. Westover's Morman-but-different family is fascinating and horrifying in equal parts. I was amazed at how great her family's talents are considering they have no formal education (apart from Tara and one brother, and that's not until their mid- to late teens).  It was hard to understand how the family allowed one brother to abuse Tara and her sister pretty much without any consequences. The workplace accidents and near-accidents are hilarious and horrendous. It's a must-read and I will recommend it to anyone who will listen.

Priestdaddy was next. Actually when I was looking for Educated in the bookshop I asked an assistant and accidentally described this book instead. But he found me the right one anyway! So I ended up putting this one down about a chapter or two in. Not sure why - maybe at first glance it is too similar to Educated, maybe Educated is just a hard act to follow.

Funnily enough, Lower back tattoo was a great read (it made me laugh, it made me cry...). Before reading this, I had found Schumer raunchily funny. Now I just want to be her friend (but I'm not really in her demographic so she would probably find that weird).

Now that we have the two winning memoirs out of the way, I am alternating between Diary and Priestdaddy. I'm pretty confident they will grow on me.

The need for victim blaming

• A woman was attacked while walking home from the pub? She shouldn't have been out walking in the dark.
• Someone took all the produce and didn't put money into the honesty box? It's madness to leave your stuff out where anyone can steal it.
• Young person can't get a job? They are probably lazy and entitled.

These are all examples of victim blaming. It's very politically incorrect to do so, but we've all heard (maybe even said) something like the above, often.

I think it's to do with believing in the cause and effect, and the need to have control. For example, if I work hard at my job I will get a promotion and a pay rise; if I take care of my looks, keep the house clean and cook my husband great meals he won't leave me for someone else. If I eat healthily I won't get sick.

But we all know these are not guaranteed. Good things happen to bad people. Financially responsible people can become homeless. Non smokers can get lung cancer.

I've been re-reading The Idiot Brain, by Welsh neuroscientist Dean Burnett. Quite apart from the fact that this guy writes like the Bill Bryson of medical writing (i.e. highly readable, funny and really enlightening), he provides a neuroscientist's view of why we as society victim-blame.

One factor in why we do this is is because we tend to find it difficult to empathise (obviously it varies from person to person), due to the fact that our brains are egocentric. He describes an experiment in which one person has to touch something nice while a second person has to touch something disgusting. The person touching something nice finds it difficult to sympathise with the other. However if both people have to touch something gross then it's easy for them to sympathise with each other.

The other factor is what he calls the "just world" hypothesis. The brain assumes that the world is fair, good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished. If a bad thing happens to someone then they must have done something to deserve it. Because if they didn't, then that means it could happen to us, who are most definitely behaving well. Our brain is uncomfortable with the possibility that bad things could happen to us even if we don't deserve it. So it chooses to have us believe that it must have been deserved.

So there you have it - our brains make it hard for us to empathise with someone less fortunate than us and in fact makes us blame the unfortunate for whatever has happened to them.

(That doesn't mean we should just let it happen though.)

Stories that make you go "hmm..."

When I'm in the library looking for something to read that isn't knitting or sewing related, I find browsing the Librarian's Choice shelf is often quite successful.

The most recent good find is a book of short stories called Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson. The author apparently won a Pulitzer Prize of an earlier novel (The Orphan Master's Son).

It's just great. The stories are sad but not poignant. There were no chuckles whatsoever to relieve the tragedy. But the people in them haunted me and made me realise how much I just don't know about people.

Like, there's one about a former warden of an East German political prison who can't accept that anything really bad ever happened in there (and anyway they deserved it). And the one about the survivor of child sex abuse who struggles to do something positive with his life. Serious themes, but don't run away from them - it's worth it.

Chinese authors I have loved (to read)

Temporarily on a break from Kazoo Ishiguro, I have harked back to the Chinese authors I have often sought when looking for fiction I can relate to:

Of course, I enjoy Amy Tan immensely (apart from Valley of Amazement, which to me was like a Chinese Memoirs of a Geisha). I must find myself another copy of The Kitchen God's Wife, because I lent it to my brother a decade ago and never saw it again.The last one I read by Tan was Saving Fish from Drowning. This wasn't a mother-daughter themed story - quite a departure for her - but a good read nonetheless.

I have a copy of David Wong Louie's book of short stories, Pangs of love, which are mostly (but solely) about flawed Chinese American men just trying to have relationships, good and bad. The first few are my favourites, I suppose because they confront the cultural divide rather than ignore.

Wayson Choy wrote The Jade Peony which is set in Canada in the 30's and follows the stories of three members of a Cantonese-speaking family. It forced me to learn just how hard life must have been for Chinese in Western countries and back in old China (especially if you were female). But it's not an "educational" book. They are stories of three children growing up in a particular time and place and are very accessible. The grandmother is familiar, both annoyingly old-fashioned and refreshingly wise. I also recently finished another of his books which is about the same family but from the perspective of just the eldest son.

Patricia Chao's Monkey King is a dark tale of a young woman who tries to kill herself because of stuff that happened to her as a child, and how she deals with those things in a mental institution afterwards. It's not utterly depressing though so don't let that put you off.

The above are all North American writers. Why haven't I found the works of any Chinese-British authors at my library? Or those of Chinese Australians or even Chinese New Zealanders?

(Actually I do have two books by a Chinese New Zealander - When the Moon Turns Silver by Alison Wong, plus a book of her poetry. They are great. )

I need to read fiction that feels like my kind of reality. The only way to find it these day is do what Phil Twyford did to try and convince us that overseas Chinese are buying up all of the Auckland houses - I look out for Asian-sounding surnames along the stacks.

A Japanese influence

It all started when I looked up images of linen dresses on the 'Net and came across those super-oversized indigo Japanese dresses. They looked so cool (in both senses of the word) that I had to have one. I sewed one up and it fits - but I don't need to tell you that mine doesn't look as cool on me as those dresses look on those Japanese models.

I am thinking of chopping off the neckline section and replacing it with a new bodice that has a deeper neckline.

I was more successful in my next Japanese-style activity though...

Continuing in the Japanese vein, I re-read Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. Great story. Sad. Perhaps a touch too much detail about butlering. A great story nonetheless - I loved the way he made it about the relationship between a super-uptight butler and a housekeeper, while in the background World War II is brewing and his employer is unknowingly becoming a traitor. (As you can tell, although the writer is Japanese this is a very English story.)

Then I read Never Let Me Go, also by Ishiguro. I'd not heard of it before the movie of the same name came out, and didn't bother to go see it. The book is marvellous. He delves into a world in which... sorry I had to delete the next two sentences in case you want to read it and don't already know the "dark secret". But the main story is about the relationship between three young people as they are schooled and grow up. The other thing is just the background, yet it's what makes this story so heartbreaking.

It's very handy having a Kindle because I can go right through Ishiguro's entire catalogue.

The next one I finished was A Pale View of the Hills. A Japanese woman living in England remembers the time in post-WWII Nagasaki when she befriended a strange woman who lived alone with her daughter. Not a lot happens, and yet the story covers a lot about surviving in the aftermath of the atom bomb. The two previous novels left many loose ends. This one not only leaves loose ends, it also throws a few extra ones right near the end. Frustrating yet compelling, it makes me want to read it again in the hope that it will make more sense the second time around.

I hear his latest novel will be out really soon.

Listening and reading

I'm sure you'll be quite relieved to know that my blog has been reinstated on the Family Times website, here.

The voting form is still where it was before, here.

I'm just loving The Christmas Album 2013 which I bought last week. It's the one which is a fundraiser for Starship Children's Hospital. Apart from the ho-hum rendering of Fairytale of New York (which isn't helped by the fact that I'm utterly over this depressing song), every song is a gem.

My absolute favourite, which I tend to replay repeatedly, is SOL3 MIO's cover of Have Yourself a Merry Christmas. It's just beautiful and I could listen to these boys sing forever. In fact, I'm going to go out later and look for their CD - even if it turns out to be a local Three Tenors type of thing.

I must tell you about two books I've been reading, both of which are set in China. The first is Jung Chang's Empress Dowage Cixi. It's a work of non-fiction, telling the story of how a young Manchurian woman made her way from being an emperor's low-ranked concubine to effectively China's ruler. If Jung Chang's research is to be believed, Cixi's intellect and cunning were astonishing. She's also  forward-thinking and not at all the tyrant we know from history. It's not at all dry and probably the most difficult aspect is remembering who everyone is.

The other is Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement. I'm a Tan fan from way back, so even though I would not have touched this book if it were by any author, I bought it because it's by Amy Tan. Unfortunately even though it's well enough written, it is turning exactly as I'd feared. By which I mean that it's Memoirs of a Geisha with a Chinese setting and without the tiresome descriptions of kimonos. I will keep reading it, in case it gets better, but at this stage it doesn't feel like a keeper.

non-knitting books I've been reading

It was a sewing book.

Just kidding. After a long stretch of narrowly focusing on that particular aisle in the public library which starts with interior design, moves onto cross-stitch, weaving and knitting before finishing with crochet - I decided that I had enough cardigan patterns.

So I read David Sedaris' When you are engulfed in flames, which I loved. It's one of those blackly funny memoir-type books which I would have loved to write myself (but my protagonist would not have been a gay American ex-smoker). I liked it so much I went back for another one - which title I forget, but it's full of animal stories (as in, there are no people but the animals are people, if you get my drift). It's also funny, bleak and makes me nod my head and go "yes, that's right".

I also have The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgekinson. But it's not as interesting because it's too simular to his How to be Idle. I suspect the author's a bit of a libertarian, as he's always going on about how the government is controlling the population. But he is also anti-capitalist, so that's alright. I can't help feeling though that his way of living only works if you are a free-lancer and if everyone else is still part of the "system".

So much for that

I'm talking about the book by Lionel Shriver. I finished it ages ago - had to, because the library only lets you borrow a book for 4 weeks and won't let you renew.

Anyway.

The premise of the book is this. What do you do if you are finally - after decades of dreaming, planning, earning and saving - ready to take the plunge and retire to a life of relative luxury on a beautiful-but-cheap third world country...only to find out that your spouse has cancer and needs the not-quite-adequate health insurance that comes with your hated job?

I was prepared for the book to be depressing, but it wasn't all that. The guy whose life dream was so rudely crushed, whose savings are now destined to be flushed down the black hole that is the cost of American healthcare, doesn't sink into a pit of despair. He rises to the challenge of looking after his wife, who is bitter and angry at her fate; stays in his thankless job under a useless jerk of a boss; and staunchly deals with it. Then he wins.
 
When Shriver (through her characters) talks about the American healthcare system, it's like she did all her research from the Mike Moore movie. Actually, if you're quite cynical about the American way of life and the way it seems to be controlled by the rich and the corporate, you'll be nodding and going "hell yeah!" and "bastards!".

But our hero, the little guy who plays by the rules, well you could say he wakes up.
There's even a happy ending.

At last, a novel I want to get my hands on

Lionel Shriver's We need to talk about Kevin is one of my favourite novels, and one of the few which I am happy to re-read multiple times. Not because I have a special interest in high school shootings, but because I was fascinated by how she portrayed something that people never admit to - having ambivalent feelings about your own child.

And now she's written about about a guy who decides to put his life dream on hold, for the sake of his cancer-stricken wife, So much for that. Time passes, the man's bank balance dwindles and his wife is still going to die. Like Kevin, it sounds like a really depressing read. But I'm convinced I am going to love it, because I myself am often tortured by the conflict between pleasing oneself and doing the right thing for someone else (it might be a Chinese thing, I dunno).

Though it might be a while before I am willing to shell out up to $30-40 dollars for my own copy. I'm so very used to borrowing from the library (even if it means waiting a few years for it to become available).

Neil and Simon, we're coming!

It's been years since I've been to a Festival of the Arts event - the tickets are usually pretty expensive and anyway I've become such a homebody.

But Neil Gaiman and Simon Schama (of History of Britain fame) are two of the writers who are taking part in the Writers and Readers programme. I really enjoying Schama's History, while Gaiman is the boy's all time favourite auther.

So we are going, recession be damned!

From fashionistas to the literati

Yep, still sick, though no longer feel like razor blades inhabit my gullet; still sound like an elderly alcoholic Rod Stewart impersonator who's been on 2 packs a day all her life.

But perked up somewhat when I saw the boy - most wonderful spouse who has nursed me tenderly all week and only occasionally complained about the snoring - had brought home Season One of Project Runway on DVD. Although a rabid fan from the first episode I saw, we didn't actually get around to watching the show until about two thirds of the way into Season One, so much of this is new and exciting.

Have hungrily watched the first two disks already (out of four) - interesting that Heidi sounds so much less robotic than in later seasons. Like she got her confidence and decided to just be herself?

Also, there is much more focus on the models in Season One. We even get to see the emotional reactions of the models who get eliminated at the beginning of each episode. I wonder if the producers stopped this because they couldn't find another flakey girl like Morgan to entertain us and frustrate the designers.

I'm hoping to go to Alison Wong's book launch on Monday. Though obviously if there's a risk of phlegming out the literati I'll just go home and ask her to save me a couple of signed copies of As the earth turns silver.

Bad bargain

So, a while back we were in Borders and perusing the 3-for-2 table. And if you've been following this blog closely, you might recall that I settled on Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart, Bill Bryson's Shakespeare and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I really only wanted the latter 2 titles, but the Kiwi bargain hunter in me couldn't turn down the chance of a free third book, so I picked the Picoult even though she's not an author I've ever been attracted to.

Well as it happens, I loved the Bryson and the Diaz. But the Picoult is a total disappointment. Her book reminds me very much of John Grisham (of which I read The Firm and Pelican Brief and -yes, even a third book which was much worse than the first 2 and the one that made me realise what a waste of my life these books were).

And that is my conclusion - Picoult is the anxious parent's Grisham. One of the things I liked least about Change of Heart was its religious theme - priest suffering a crisis of faith, deathrow prisoner who performs miracles a la Green Mile, fat single female lawyer who can't find a boyfriend - oh wait, that last one's not religious...or is it?

And then the realisation that I've been ripped off. The 3-for-2 deal gave us the cheapest book for free. The cheapest of our trio was the Bryson, while the Picoult was the most expensive. If I'd just picked up the 2 books I wanted in the first place I probably would have spent less.

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

I finished this novel of Junot Diaz's last night. Though when I say finished, I should admit that I didn't read most of the footnotes. The proportion of footnote to body text was so high that some pages were just footnotes - with a couple of sentences of body text added on for visual texture**.

There were a couple of other things about this book that I found a little annoying. One was the heavy-handed use of Lord of the Rings references, though I can see why it's there - it's because Oscar is a total geek and LOTR fan. The other thing was his liberal use of Spanish words, with no accompanying glossary at the back. True, I could get the gist of the meaning from the context. But I've no doubt that the subtler meanings were quite lost to me.

The good thing about this book is that it's a compelling story about a group of flawed characters whom I couldn't help but feel empathy with - Oscar, the overweight and constantly lovelorn geek; Lola, his Amazonian sister; Beli, their bitter and disappointed mother; and La Inca, Beli's adoptive mother. Basically, it's about a Dominican family enduring three generations of horrible luck, beginning during the terrifying reign of the dictator Trujillo. There is no happy ending as such, but it's not utterly depressing - just very sad.

The chapter that really grabbed me was the one about Lola, her desperate need to get away from home and the destructive influence of her mother, and her inability to sever the emotional tie. After that I was sucked in until the last page.

**Footnote about the footnotes: it's from Diaz's footnotes that you learn about the political environment that is the setting for this novel. They are a pretty unhappy read.

Bedtime reading

My fiction reading list is currently interspersed with various library books and magazines about fashion, sewing and styling. But fear not, I have been feeding my literary side too.

I've just finished re-reading Charlotte Randall's The Curative, which I loved first time around. I don't know why it took me so long to read it a second time, it's such a good book. Considering it's set within a 19th Century insane asylum and almost all of the action is inside the head of one highly-educated and not-at-all insane (but morally objectionable) male inmate, it's a bloody good read. Sure, there are plenty of words used that I have no idea of the meaning of, but that's part of the fun. Lonsdale, the inmate in question, loves words. He doesn't seem to know why he's in there, but he's keeping himself sane by talking to whomever will listen, including his vegetative cellmate.

And now I have three new non-clothing-related books next to my pillow. Last time we were in Borders, I noticed that Bill Bryson's Shakespeare was on the 3 for 2 table. A bit of hunting around on that table turned up Junot Diaz's The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Score! But it was not so easy finding that elusive third book. Finally I settled on Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart. I've never read her work before, and have heard that she's not a particularly good writer in the literary sense. But I've also heard that she tells a damn good story, so I picked it up and we had our trio of books.

Okay, so only one of those 3 Borders purchases qualifies as literary (Bryson's book being non-fiction). But who cares?

The Historian

Last night I finally finished Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. I'm still trying to decide whether it's a good book or not.

It's very, very long.

If you ever wanted to know what it might be like to do Raiders of the Lost Ark but replacing the archeologist with a historian, then you'll be disappointed that the the book contains no ominous advancing boulders, hardly any guns and only negligible amounts of vodka.

But there is a huge amount of research. In fact, I got the feeling that Kostova might have spent years doing research on how historians do research, and couldn't bear to leave any details out of her novel. I'm fairly certain that this door-stopper of a book could easily have been half as long, without losing any of the story.

There were far too many transcripts of letters written by monks about trips around the Balkans. Worse, I was bothered by the unexplained, too-fortuitous meetings with complete strangers who turned out to have a connection to the big D (Dracula).

And so much of the story is told via letters - letters to the young girl from her historian father, letters to the father from his PhD supervisor, letters to the supervisor from his best mate, letters from the girl's mysteriously absent mother, and of course, letters between monks travelling around the Balkans with their bloodthirsty baggage. I know it's a literary device, but I couldn't help wondering why these people wrote such detailed letters - why didn't they just write a book and be done with it?

Last of all, the ending was predictable. And I'm not even one of those annoying people who see the plot twist in the first hour of the film and then tell everyone what's going to happen.

Having said that, I did manage to read the whole thing, and I only got bored with all the letter-reading about two thirds of the way in. So maybe if you've time to kill, like the idea of an adventure peopled by undead librarians and feisty academics, then this book wouldn't necessarily be a waste of money.

Two movies and a novel

Notes on a Scandal: It was the only movie on the telly that sounded even remotely watchable, with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett heading the cast. And it turned out to be really, really watchable. Dench plays Barbara, a loveless old history teacher at a secondary school (high school) who develops a crush on the new and beautiful art teacher, the married but desperately lonely Sheba (played by Blanchett). Barbara soon becomes Sheba's only friend and confidante, which plays into the former's hopes for some kind of lesbian relationship. And when she catches Sheba in an inappropriately intimate embrace with an underaged boy pupil, the stalker-ishly needy Barbara sees their little secret as an opportunity to get even closer into Sheba's undergarments.

The thing about this story is that - even though I disliked Barbara for being psychotic and manipulative, and I disliked Sheba for her irresponsible fling - in the end I just felt sympathy for the both of them, for their loneliness and need to grasp at any chance of emotional intimacy.

Madagascar - Escape 2 Africa: It was rainy this morning, so I took TLM to the movies. It was her very first cinematic experience, and she was enthralled. There was none of that restless wriggling that you might get when at the movies with small children, though it might have helped that she had her own packet of chippies to munch through. Although she did almost disappear into her fold-down theatre seat when she sat too far back.

As for the film itself, I really enjoyed it. But I did feel sorry for the poor creature that became the "sacrifice" to the rain gods in the volcano, when the waterhole dried up. There were lots of laugh-out-loud moments, and even a tear-inducing romantic scene between the giraffe and the hippo.


The Historian: Having not been a teenage girl for quite some time, I have absolutely no interest in Twilight, that vampiric Mills and Boon series that has become a teen hit movie. I picked up The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, from the discount bin at a local bookshop and have been enjoying it since. It's, like, a literary vampire story for academics and librarians. Or something.

I'm only about three chapters in, but so far it's about a teenage girl whose historian father possesses evidence that Dracula is alive and sucking somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Stylish and brainy

I might well the only person on Earth who prefers a bit of copy to go with her fashion magazine photo spreads. For most people who like looking at nice clothes, it wouldn't matter if the words were in French, German or Icelandic.

So I'm really enjoying The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable, by Hadley Freeman (it was one of the three books I ordered on the Internet - I'm still waiting for the Buffy book...). Freeman is a fashion writer for The Guardian, and this book is a collection of her columns for that paper. It's, like, literary.

What I like about the book is that it's well written, witty, and quite down to earth. She obviously has an interest in fashion, but she's not going to tell you that a trenchcoat - or any item of clothing or accessory - is a "must have", and has a healthy disrespect for fashion media. She also acknowledges that it's quite okay to spend a grand on a handbag, as long as your love of the handbag outweighs your guilt about spending so much money on it.

And there aren't even any pictures...

The complex decision-making process in choosing which fiction to buy

It was No Milk Please who recommended Junot Diaz as an author. But No Milk is obviously fluent in Spanish, while mine is limited to such touristy favourites as "donde esta el servicio?" (where is the toilet?) and "Quanto questa?" (How much?).

So when I flicked through a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and found all those untranslated Spanish phrases, I put the book down and went looking for Monica Ali's Brick Lane. The review of the movie sounded pretty good, but...there's just something a bit uncool about reading a book after the movie comes out.

And then I thought, why not ask the staff whether they've got Diaz' book of short stories? No Milk said it was just about the only book of short stories he'd ever read in which every single story was great. They had one last copy in the shop. So that's the one I bought - Drown.

And so far, he's right. Even though they're full of words and phrases in Spanish, I've enjoyed every story I've read. Imagine how much more I'd appreciate them if I understand all the words. Characters re-appear throughout the book, so it's a little like reading an episodic novel - like Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club (which, apparently, is in fact 16 short stories marketed as one novel). The stories are mostly not happy, yet they aren't depressing. How the hell does Diaz do that?

I might even go back to the book shop and get Oscar Wao.

We went to the Storylines Festival

What fun. We headed straight for the face-painters, because it would be her first time. Waiting in the queue, I wondered what she was ask for - the china doll? the butterfly? the tiger?

As it turned out, TLM wanted to be a pirate. She managed to keep amazingly still while the volunteer drew a black eye patch on one side of TLM's face and a ragged scar on the other. She grinned at her new face in the mirror and told me she had a big "owie" on her cheek.

Unfortunately, she couldn't resist picking and wiping at it during the story-telling session, and soon it was faded like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

At the Animal Undie Ball stand, we made cardboard underpants and pegged them up on the line.
At the public library corner, we sat on floor cushions and oohed and ahhed over a large Dr Seuss pop-up book.
Somewhere in between was Hairy McLary, who put down his bone to give TLM a bear hug.

Yeah it was fun.

Hairy, silly, slimy and a little naughty

Back in my days working in a public library, I'd always heard the children's librarian recommend Babette Cole's picture books to parents. At the time of course, I was childless and therefore I never expected such information to hibernate in the back of my mind, only to resurface when TLM was born.

We've just borrowed several of her books recently from the library and - good gods, but Babette Cole is funny. It's partly the irreverent subject matter, partly her hilarious drawings of snot, hairy man-fairies and strangely-shaped heads. TLM is currently getting lots of giggles from The Hairy Book, The Slime Book and The Silly Book (or perhaps she just enjoys imitating the peculiar laugh I affect for her amusement). I think she enjoyed Mummy Never Told Me too, but after the first time we read it together, I'm too scared to show it her again. It has, like, a picture of naked and spindly mummy and daddy in their bedroom, supposedly hoping for some childfree lurve, while the narrator wonder why his parents sometimes lock him out of their room. I can't be sure it's age-appropriate.

I don't know about TLM, but I reckon it's be worth getting all her books out just for my own reading pleasure.